Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 25, Issue 1, 1991

This study explores audience awareness of writers as they compose for contrasting audiences. Experienced writers—all of them writing instructors at large public universities―composed aloud for two audiences which differed along the dimension of authority: incoming freshmen and a faculty committee. Protocols were analyzed for patterns of writing activities among all writers and for individual writers. Among all writers, two clear patterns emerged. Writers analyzed the faculty audience less frequently than the freshman audience, but they evaluated their text and writing goals more frequently when addressing the faculty. For individual writers, strong “interpretive frameworks” emerged, unique ways in which writersi nterpreted audiences and writing tasks, foregrounding quite different elements of the rhetorical situation. At times, interpretive frameworks overrode differences between the two audiences presented in the writing tasks; that is, writers attributed the same characteristics to both audiences despite the difference in these audiences’ social status within the university structure.

This study investigates the impact of task definition on students’ revising strategies. Our primary aim was to determine if freshman students could revise globally if instructed to do so and if those global revisions would result in improved texts. We asked two groups of freshmen to revise a text provided by the experimenters; one group was given eight minutes of instruction on how to revise globally, and the other was simply asked to make the text better. The texts written by students who received the instruction were judged both to be of significantly better quality and to have included significantly more global revision. Further, the improvement appears to affect the treated population generally rather than just a small part of that population.

This article reviews the recent complex and somewhatc onfusing evidence on writing-to-learn and discusses why this lack of clarity exists. It then draws on the field of cognitive psychology to offer a way to reconceptualize how researchers might approach the study of the impact of writing on learning. This reconceptualization involves a modification in both how researchers select writing tasks and conditions in writing-to-learni nvestigationsa nd how they assess the possible knowledge changes due to writing. In the selection of writing tasks and conditions, it is suggested that researchers draw on theories of knowledge change to guide their selections. Four basic theoretical mechanisms potentially related to knowledge change due to writing are discussed. In the measurement of knowledge change, it is argued that writing may more likely influence structural than reproductive aspects of knowledge. Five methods for assessing structural changes in knowledge due to writing are considered.

Arguing that current research has fragmented educators’ vision of both written language and development, this article aims to contribute to a more integrative vision, one that preserves the integrity of written language as a symbol system. Based on a critical consideration of literature both on written language growth and on the role of symbols in human experience, the article suggests five principles that would seem to characterize written language development: the establishment of equivalences, exploration and orchestration of the system, reliance on shifting relationships of form and function, differentiation and integration of symbolic functions, and participation in social dialogue. These principles highlight the dialectical relationship between function and form, between child construction and adult guidance. The articulated vision of development differs in fundamental ways from most current viewpoints, as it does not consider written language as simply an extension of the child’s oral language but as the evolution of a distinct symbolic option with links to the child’s entire symbolic repertoire. The implications of this viewpoint for both sociopolitical and pedagogical issues of literacy construction in early schooling are discussed.